
ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 



HENRY CHARLES LEA, 

PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 



Reprinted from the Annual Report of the American Historical Association 
for the year 1903, Vol. I, pages 53-69. 



WASHINGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE. 

1904. 



II.— ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 



By HENRY CHARLES LEA, 

President of the American Historical Association. 



53 



FEB IS 1905 



- 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY.' 



By Henry Charles Lea. 



Circumstances deprive me of the honor of presiding over 
this meeting- of the American Historical Association to which 
your kindly appreciation has called me, but at least I can 
fulfil the pleasant duty of addressing- to you a few words on 
a topic which is of interest to all of us, whether students or 
writers of history. In this 1 do not pretend to instruct those 
whose opinions are, to say the least, fully as mature and 
worthy of consideration as my own, but merely to contribute 
to a discussion which will probably continue as long- as men 
shall strive to bring the annals of the past to the knowledge 
of the present. 

One whose loss we all deplore and whose memory we honor 
as perhaps the most learned and thoughtful scholar in the 
English-speaking world — the late Lord Acton — in his well- 
known Cambridge lecture, has formally placed on record his 
opinion on ethical values in histoiy when saying, WW I exhort 
you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the stand- 
ard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that 
governs your own lives and to suffer no man and no cause to 
escape the undying penalty which history has the power to 
inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and miti- 
gation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met 
by arguments which go to confuse, to palliate, to confound 
right and wrong, and to reduce the just man to the level of 
the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, 
first of all, those who made history what it has become. They 
set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges 
the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish 
Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present." 

a The President's address to the American Historical Association, December 29, 1903 



56 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

The argument with which Lord Acton justifies this exhor- 
tation to his .students presupposes a .tixed and unalterable 
standard of morality, together with the comfortable assurance 
that we have attained to that absolute knowledge of right and 
wrong which enables us to pass linal judgment on the men of 
the past, secure that we make no mistake when we measure 
them by our own moral yardstick. Every foregone age has 
similarly nattered itself, and presumably every succeeding 
one will continue to cherish the same illusion. 

I must confess that to me all this seems to be based on false 
premises and to lead to unfortunate conclusions as to the 
objects and purposes of history, however much it may serve 
to give point and piquancy to a narrative, to stimulate the 
interest of the casual reader by heightening lights and deep- 
ening shadows, and to subserve the purpose of propagating 
the opinions of the writer. 

As regards the inferred premiss that there is an absolute 
and invariable moral code by which the men of all ages and 
of all degrees of civilization are to be tried and convicted or 
acquitted, a very slender acquaintance with the history of 
ethics would appear sufficient to establish its fallacy. It 
would be overbold to suggest that morals are purely conven- 
tional and arbitrary, yet anthropological research has shown 
that there is scarce a sin condemned in the Decalogue which 
has not been or may not now be regarded rather as a virtue, 
or at least as an allowable practice, at some time or place 
among a portion of mankind, and no one would be so hardy 
as to judge with the severit}* of the Hebrew lawgiver those 
who merely follow the habits and customs in which they have 
been trained. We regard the gallows as the rightful portion 
of him who slays his fellow-creature for gain, yet who among 
you would inflict the death penalty on the head-hunter of 
Borneo? You would condemn the superstition which leads 
him to glory in the deed, but your conscience would acquit 
him of personal guilt, for he but follows the tradition of his 
race, and he may in all other human relations lead an exem- 
plary life. The actor in a Corsican vendetta is not to be 
judged as a common murderer, although his life ma} r rightly 
pay to society the forfeit arising from his being the survival 
of an older and ruder civilization. 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 57 

Race, civilization, environment, all influence the moral per- 
ceptions, which vary from age to age, while the standards 
of right and wrong are modified and adapted to what at the 
moment are regarded as the objects most beneficial to the 
individual or to the social organization. At one time these 
may concern the purity or advancement of religion; at another, 
self-preservation or the welfare of the clan or the nation; at 
another, personal well-being and the development of industry 
as a means to that end. Whatever stands foremost in any 
given period will be apt to receive special recognition from 
both the ethical teacher and the lawgiver. It is to legislation 
that we must look if we desire to understand the modes of 
thought and the moral standards of past ages; and a compari- 
son of these with those now current will show how unstable 
and fluctuating are ethical conceptions. We are unable to con- 
ceive of' vicarious punishment as justifiable, yet Hammurabi 
in some cases slays the innocent son and lets the guiltj^ father 
go scathless. To us the idea of levirate marriage is abhorrent, 
but it has been regarded as legally a duty by races so far 
removed from each other in origin and distance as the Hebrew 
and the Hindu. Among the Hebrews the severest of all pen- 
alties was lapidation, which was reserved for the most atrocious 
crimes. Of these, omitting sexual aberrations, which we need 
not consider here, Thonissen enumerates eight — idol worship, 
consecration of children to Moloch, magic and divination, 
blasphemy, Sabbath breaking, cursing a parent, and disobedi- 
ence to parents. Examine our modern codes, in which these 
have either disappeared or are treated as comparatively trivial 
offenses, and } t ou will be constrained to admit that crime is 
largely conventional, dependent not on an eternal and impre- 
scriptible moral law, but on the environment in which a por- 
tion of mankind happens at the time to be placed. To the 
Hebrew priest the preservation of his religion was the one 
essential thing, and no penalty was too severe for aught that 
threatened its supremacy. 

So it was in the middle ages, when the priest erected a sim- 
ilar standard of morals, claimed for it the sanction of divine 
law, and compelled its insertion in statute law. No character 
in medieval history stands forth with greater luster than the 
good St. Louis of France, yet, if his faithful biographer de 



58 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

Joinville is to bo believed, he held that the only argument 
which a layman should use with a heretic was to thrust a 
sword into him; and we know by authentic documents that he 
fostered the nascent Inquisition and had no scruple in enrich- 
ing his treasury with the confiscations resulting from the burn- 
ing of heretics. We of to-day are not lacking in religious 
convictions, though we are learning the lesson of toleration; 
lapidation and the stake for opinion's sake are abhorrent to 
us, but who among us would feel justified in applying Lord 
Acton's formula and condemning the Hebrew or St. Louis 
when we feel that they acted on profound conviction? No 
English jurist has left a fairer record than Chief Justice Hale, 
yet he calmly sent to the gallows poor old women for witch- 
craft, such being the law of the land to which he gave his 
hearty concurrence. Would yon condemn him as you would 
a modern judge? Voltaire has sufficiently shown the use that 
may be made of thus trying one age by the standards of another 
in his mocking sketch of David, the man after God's own 
heart. 

It may perhaps be urged that in thus asserting the tempo- 
rary and variable character of morals we are destroying the 
foundations of morality in general and the eternal distinction 
between right and wrong. This is begging the question, for 
it presupposes that there is a universal and inflexible standard 
of morals. Such there may be, like the so-called law of nature 
of the scholastic theologians, but the histoiy of mankind fails 
to reveal it, and the truest test of any period is the standard 
which it made or accepted, for this shows, better than aught 
else, whether it was a period of progress or one of retrogres- 
sion. Speculations enough there have been among philoso- 
phers, ancient and modern, as to the origin of the conception 
of what we call sin and righteousness, which would lead us 
too far from our subject to discuss here. Suffice it to say 
that what we find current around us is merely the result of 
the finite wisdom of our ancestors adapting themselves to the 
exigencies of their surroundings. We have fortunately inher- 
ited the noble'ideals of the school of Hillel, broadened and 
deepened and rendered applicable to all mankind by the teach- 
ings of Christ. We have accepted them in theory for well- 
nigh two thousand years, yet only within a centuiy or two has 
there been any serious effort to reduce them to practice, and 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 59 

that effort thus far has been more significant in its failures 
than in its successes. There is ample work before us in labor- 
ing - for their embodiment in our daily lives, and we can well 
afford to cast the mantle of charity over those who, in fact, 
have been onfy one or two steps behind us in the application 
of the Sermon on the Mount. 

Meanwhile, as connected with our subject, we may reflect that 
there is some truth in the distinction drawn by the casuists 
between material and formal sin — the sin which a man com- 
mits in ignorance being venial, while that which he does know- 
ingly is mortal. This doctrine is not without its dangers, and 
Pascal has exposed the unmoral results to which it may lead 
in skillful hands, but for our purpose it ma} r be borne in 
mind when we feel called upon to pass judgment on historical 
characters. It makes the human conscience the standard of 
conduct. If a man does wrong, conscientiously believing it 
to be right, he is justified before God; if he does right believ- 
ing it to be wrong, he is condemned. Rough!}' speaking, in 
a region so full of pitfalls for unwary feet, the theory of in- 
vincible ignorance, though liable to abuse, is not to be over- 
looked. 

Thus far I have sought briefly to show that Lord Acton's 
dictum is defective in principle. As regards its practical 
application, I presume that you will agree with me that his- 
tory is not to be written as a Sunday-school tale for children 
of larger growth. It is, or should be, a serious attempt to 
ascertain the severest truth as to the past and to set it forth 
without fear or favor. It may and it generally will, conve} T 
a moral, but that moral should educe itself from the facts. 
Characters historically prominent are usually so because they 
are men of their time, the representatives of its beliefs and 
aspirations; and they should be judged accordingly. If those 
beliefs and aspirations lead to evil the historian should seek 
to trace out their origin and development, and he can, if he 
so chooses, point out their results; but he should not hold 
responsible the men who obeyed their consciences, even if 
this led them into what we conceive to be wrongdoing. It is 
otherwise with those who have sinned against the light vouch- 
safed to them, for to condemn them is simply to judge them 
by the standards of their time. 

In other words, this is merely to apply the truism that the 



60 AMEKICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

historian should so familiarize himself with the period under 
treatment that, for the time, he is living in it, feeling- with 
the men whose actions he describes, and viewing* events from 
their standpoint. Thus alone can he give us an accurate 
picture of the past, making us realize its emotions and under- 
stand the evolution of its successive stages. This is the 
true philosophy of history, and from this the reader can 
gather for himself the lessons which it teaches. 

To depart from this and to inject modern ethical theories 
into the judgment of men and things of bygone times is to 
introduce subjectivity into what should be purel} T objective. 
We all of us have our convictions — perchance our preju- 
dices^ — and nothing for the historian is more vital than to be 
on his guard against their affecting his judgment and color- 
ing his narrative. Above all things he should cultivate the 
detachment which enables him soberly and impartially to 
search for and to set forth the truth. He may often feel 
righteous indignation — or what he conceives to be righteous — 
but he should strenuously repress it as a luxury to be left to 
his reader. Moreover, he should beware of theories; for 
when a theory once takes possession of a writer it renders 
him an unsafe guide and inspires reasonable distrust. The 
historian who becomes an advocate or a prosecutor instead of 
a judge forfeits his title to confidence, and, if he aspires to be 
a judge, he should not try a case by a code unknown to the 
defendant. 

Perhaps this somewhat dry disquisition can be rendered 
more interesting by a concrete example; and for this I know 
of none fitter than Philip II of Spain, whose character has 
exercised so many brilliant pens. Our eloquent Motley, who 
represents him as a monster with scarce a redeeming trait, 
says that " To judge him, or any man in his position, simply 
from his own point of view, is weak and illogical. Histoiy 
judges the man from its point of view. It condemns or 
applauds the point of view itself. The point of view of a 
malefactor is not to excuse robbery and murder. Nor is the 
spirit of the age to be pleaded in favor of the evil doer at a 
time when mortals were divided into almost equal troops" 
(Histoiy of the Netherlands, I, 6). This is the language of 
a partisan and not of an historian; and the writer is blind to 
the inference to be drawn from another remark, "That 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. (31 

monarch considered himself born to suppress heresy and he 
had certainly been carrying* out the work during* his whole 
lifetime" (Ibid., I, 257). 

Now, Philip II, as an abstract object of contemplation, is 
in no sense an attractive figure. In all that awful sixteenth 
century there was, perhaps, no one who wrought, directly 
or indirectly, so much of human misery, no one who was 
more ready to supplement open force with secret guile, no 
one who hesitated less to resort to corruption or, if needs 
be, to murder. To the historian who is content with the 
surface of things, it is eas.y to condemn him offhand and to 
adduce ample evidence in support of the verdict— the execu- 
tion of Montigny, the assassination of William the Silent and 
of Escobedo, the terrors of the Tribunal of Blood, the horrors 
of the rebellion of Granada, the stimulation of the wars of 
the League, the systematic bribery by which he bought the 
secrets of every court in Europe, to say nothing of the satis- 
faction which he derived from the spectacle of his own sub- 
jects in an auto de fe. All this is true, and to the superficial 
observer it msiy seem idle to say a word in extenuation of so 
black a catalogue of misdeeds. Yet the student in earnest 
quest of truth may reasonably pause and ask himself whether 
Philip is to be held morally responsible for all these crimes, 
whether he was a mere bloodthirsty tyrant who rejoiced in 
the infliction of suffering on his fellow-creatures and revelled, 
like the Emperor Claudius, in witnessing human agony; or 
whether he was the misguided agent of a false standard of 
duty, and conscientiously believed himself to be rendering* 
the highest service to God and to man. If the latter be the 
case, we must acquit Philip of conscious guilt, and reserve 
our censure for the spirit of the age which misled him. If 
Elijah is praised for sla} 7 ing in one night four hundred and 
fifty priests of Baal, how is Philip to be condemned for 
merely utilizing larger opportunities in the same spirit? 
Does not, in truth, the difference lie only in the question, 
Whose ox is gored? Even in the assassinations which he 
ordered he had the assurance of his confessor, Fray Diego de 
Chaves, that a prince was fully authorized to take the lives of 
his subjects without process of law. 

When, in fact, we analyze his reign, we find that the en- 
forcement of religious unity was the primary motive of his 



62 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

public career, and that it was the object of almost all the acts 
for which we are asked to condemn him. For three hundred 
years it had been the uncontested rule in both church and 
state that the obstinate dissident, or heretic, was to be put to 
death by fire. Even men of the largest Christian charity ac- 
cepted this as one of the eternal verities, and he who ventured 
to question it became himself a heretic who must either recant 
or share the same fate. Heresy was not only a sin, subject 
to spiritual animadversion, but a crime visited with capital 
punishment by all the secular codes of Europe. Pity were 
better invoked for the murderer or the highwayman than for 
the heretic; for the heretic was the slayer of souls, while the 
ordinary criminal affected only the bod} r or the purse. With 
the outbreak of the Reformation, the threatened disruption of 
the unity of faith inflamed to the highest pitch the zeal for its 
preservation, though we need not pause to inquire how much 
the lust of worldly power and wealth disguised itself under 
the striving for the salvation of souls. When djmasties de- 
pended on dogmas, religion became of necessity the most 
absorbing of public questions, and the self-deception was easy 
which clothed secular ambitions in spiritual garments. In 
the passions of the tremendous struggle each side was equally 
sure that it alone possessed the true faith, which was to be 
vindicated with tire and sword. If the canon law required 
sovereigns to put heretics to death, Luther in 1528 subscribed 
to a declaration of the Wittenberg theologians prescribing the 
same fate for those whom they classed as such. If Paul IV 
in 1555 decreed that all who denied the Trinity should be piti- 
lessly burned, even though they recanted and professed con- 
version, he but followed the example which Calvin had set, 
two 3'ears before, in the case of Miguel Servet. If France 
had her feast of St. Bartholomew, Germaiw had led the way 
in the slaughter of the Anabaptists. If Spain had her inqui- 
sition, England in 1550, under the reforming Edward VI, 
created a similar organization, with Cranmer at its head, and 
Ridley, Miles Coverdale, and other eminent Protestants as in- 
quisitors, to seek out, try, and punish dissidents, and to aban- 
don to the secular arm those who proved to be obstinate. 
Motley fell into grievous error when he asserted that in the 
sixteenth century "mortals were divided into almost equal 
troops " concerning the "spirit of the age." Those whom 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 63 

he represents as struggling for freedom of conscience only 
wanted freedom to coerce the consciences of others, as was 
shown in 1566 by the Fury of Antwerp, and in 1618 when the 
S} 7 nod of Dort sat in judgment on the Remonstrants. How 
the Calvinists shared the "spirit of the age' 1 is well expressed 
in John Knox's exulting declaration that in 15(51, before the 
arrival in Scotland of Queen Mary, ""the Papists were so con- 
founded that none within the Realnie durst avow the hearing 
or saying of Masse then the thieves of Tiddisdale durst avow 
their stouth or stealing in the presence of any upright judge.' 1 
The Massachusetts law of October 19, 1658, under which 
Quakers were put to death on Boston Common, suffices in 
itself to show that this conception of public duty was not con- 
fined to one race or to one confession of faith. 

This was the inevitable result of -the deplorable doctrine of 
exclusive salvation, which rendered the extinction of heresy a 
duty to God and man. To its abandonment by Protestantism 
is attributable the gradual spread of toleration. To its reten- 
tion by the Latin Church is ascribable the Ordonnance of 
May 11, 1721, under which, so late as 1762, Rochette, a pas- 
tor of the desert, was executed, merely for performing the 
rites of his religion. It is, moreover, the inspiration of the 
encyclic of 1861 in which the kind-hearted Pius IX ordered 
every Catholic to condemn the error that a man is free to 
follow the religion which his reason dictates. 

The embers which thus are not yet extinct were burning 
fiercely in the sixteenth century, and into its superheated fa- 
naticism Philip II was born in 1527. The very air which he 
breathed in childhood and youth was surcharged with all the 
elements that made persecution a supreme duty and toleration 
a denial of God. His tutor was a narrow-minded bigot, Mar- 
tinez Siliceo, rewarded in 1511 with the see of Murcia, and in 
1516 with the primatial dignity of Toledo, where he distin- 
guished himself by forcibly introducing the rule that no ca- 
thedral preferment should ever be conferred on one who had 
the slightest trace of Jewish or Moorish blood. Under such 
guidance, in such environment, and with the example before 
him of his father as the champion of Catholicism, it was 
impossible for a youth of Philip's sickly frame, limitations 
of thought, sluggishness of intellect, habitual suspicion, and 
obstinate tenacity of purpose to be other than what he was. 



C>4 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

When he succeeded to the great Spanish monarchy and found 
himself the most powerful sovereign in the civilized world, 
with authority stretching from the North Sea to the Mediter- 
ranean and from the farthest Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, 
he could scarce fail to regard himself as the instrument 
selected by Providence to defend the true religion and to 
overcome the powers of evil which had risen to supplant the 
Kingdom of God. He could not but feel that this enormous 
power had been intrusted to him for a purpose, and that it 
carried with it a correlative obligation to employ it for that 
purpose. To borrow the happy phrase of Major Hume, he 
felt himself to be the junior partner of God, and in carrying 
out with unswerving resolution the plans of God he was 
answerable to no human judgment. 

If, in the performance of this supreme duty, he found or 
deemed it necessary to employ craft and cruelty, treachery 
and corruption, he was but combating the adversaries of God 
with their own weapons — weapons, indeed, which the state- 
craft of the age had rendered familiar to all, and which were 
sanctified by the cause to which they were devoted. The 
maxims which Machiavelli had formulated with such cjmical 
clearness were utilized by others to gratify the lust of vulgar 
ambition; should he be debarred from using them when inter- 
ests were at stake superior to all worldly possessions? Nor, 
indeed, is the present age entitled to cast the first stone at the 
sixteenth century, when we consider the duplicity and the con- 
tempt for human rights which have continued to mark the 
career of statesmen from that time to this, save perhaps in 
the matter of assassination, which has been abandoned to 
anarchism. 

Apart from religious convictions, moreover, Philip as a 
statesman might well feel it to be his supreme allotted task to 
preserve in his own dominions the unity of faith which at the 
time was, reasonably enough, regarded as the absolute con- 
dition precedent of internal peace. Religious differences were 
not mere academic questions to be debated in the schools with 
more or less acrimony. We need not pause to ask against 
whom the responsibility for this is to be charged, and we may 
be content to accept the fact that in the passionate zeal of the 
time there was nothing which so deeply stirred popular feeling 
or lent more bitterness to civil broils than the theological 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 65 

issues which to-day arouse an interest comparatively so faint. 
Philip might well look upon the internal wars of Germany and 
France as a warning to keep his own territories free from the 
pestilent innovators, whose claim to exercise freedom of con- 
science included the right of resistance to any authority that 
denied the claim. To him they were perturbatorsof the pub- 
lic peace, potential rebels who at all and every cost must be 
prevented from gaining a foothold if the prosperity of the 
state and the divine right of kings were to be maintained. In 
the earlier years of his reign the growing disquiet of the 
Netherlands emphasized the importance of this precaution 
and, in the latter part, the fierce struggle which exhausted his 
resources demonstrated the necessity of strangling heresy in 
the cradle. 

Human motives, as a rule, are complex; pride and ambition 
doubtless had their share in those which urged him on his 
course, especially when he nourished vain hopes of establish- 
ing a daughter on the throne of France; but religious convic- 
tion and the welfare, temporal and eternal, as it was then 
regarded, of his subjects were ample to impel him along the 
course which he had inherited with his crown and for which 
he- had been carefully trained. Philip at least was no hypo- 
crite, using religion merely as a pretext. The sincerity of his 
faith can not be called into question, and, if his favorite vice 
was licentiousness, the dissociation of religion and morals is 
too common an anomal3 T to excite special incredulity. The 
keen-witted Venetian envoys concur in admitting his piety, 
although their experiences at his court were not such as to 
propitiate their favor, and they were by no means blind to his 
defects. Perhaps the severest characterization of him is that 
of Gianfrancesco Morosini in 1581: ""His temper is cruel, 
although he covers it with zeal for justice. He was never 
known to pardon a criminal, even his own son. He shows 
no affection for his children and no sign of regret at the death 
of his nearest kin. He is a great observer of religion, but is 
ver} 7 vindictive. Yet he manifests no signs of it, and there is 
a proverb in Spain that between the king's smile and a knife 
there is little to choose." 

A portion of this unflattering characterization is justified by 
Philip's treatment of his erstwhile favorite, Antonio Perez, 

H. Doc. 745, 58-2— vol 1 5 



66 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 

who had abused his master's confidence and had misled him 
into ordering the murder of Escobedo; but in ot^er respects 
the habitual Spanish self-control, the studied repression of all 
exhibition of feeling- under an exterior of kindly courtesy, 
deceived the Venetian, for Philip was in reality a most affec- 
tionate father. No one can read his familiar letters to his 
daughters, girls of fourteen and fifteen, written during the 
cares of his conquest of Portugal in 1581 and 1582, without 
recognizing a most unexpected side of his character, while 
his allusions to their letters t> him show that the family 
intercourse was delightfully intimate and unreserved. His 
solicitude as to their welfare is extreme; he relates whatever 
is passing around him that he thinks will amuse or interest 
them; there is no sermonizing, but only the unaffected expres- 
sion of a love that is sure of reciprocation. When he com- 
mences a long letter, June 26, 1581, by saying that he had 
been unable to write on the previous Monday, and now, in 
order to prevent a similar omission, he begins before taking 
up the business that will probably occupy him until late, we 
recognize that he did not allow the cares of state to choke up 
the fountains of mutual affection. Even more unlooked for 
are the references to Madalena, an old serving-woman who 
scolds him and threatens to leave him when he does not please 
her. On one occasion she had promised to write to the girls 
but had not shown herself; perhaps wine was the cause of 
this, but if she knew of his suggesting such a thing she would 
make him smart for it. Altogether this revelation of the vie 
intimeoi Philip and his family gives us a more human concep- 
tion of the gloomy monarch whom we are accustomed to 
picture to ourselves as ensconsed in the Escorial, toiling 
through the midnight hours in scrawling notes on ever accu- 
mulating despatches and interminable consultas. 

The unaffected tenderness of the relations between Philip 
and his daughters throws some light on the tragedy of Don 
Carlos, which has been used so effectually to blacken Philip's 
memory. Nothing but a sense of the most absolute necessity 
would have led him to deprive his son of the succession, 
which would have relieved him of the burden of royalty. 
Sickly and suffering, indolent by nature, and fond of countiy 
life, if he had had sons tit to govern, Sigismondo Cavalli tells 
us, in 1570, that he would have abandoned to them all affairs 
of state and have retired to the Escorial. Unfortunately, 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTOKY 67 

Carlos, by his wayward excesses, had long forfeited the 
affection and confidence of his father when in 1568 he was 
confined. From his early years he had been an object of 
dread to all who looked forward to his future reign. At the 
age of 12 Federigo Badoero describes him as bright and 
quick, but fierce, passionate, and obstinate. When small 
animals, such as rabbits, were brought in from the chase 
he took delight in roasting them alive and watching their 
agonies. At a still earlier age, when he learned that the 
marriage treaty between his father and Mary of England 
provided that the Netherlands should descend to their issue, 
he declared that he would not submit to it, but would fight 
his future half-brother, and he wrote to Charles V, then in 
Brussels, and asked to have a suit of armor made for him. 
As he reached manhood the curse of insanity, which he inher- 
ited from his great-grandmother, Queen Juana la loca, devel- 
oped into actions manifesting his dangerous unfitness for the 
throne. At the age of 22 he one da} r shut himself up in his 
stables for five hours, and when he came out he left twenty 
horses maimed with the most brutal cruelty. The slightest 
cause of displeasure provoked threats or attempts to poniard or 
to throw out of window, irrespective of the dignity of the 
offender. In one of his midnight sallies through the streets 
of Madrid a little water chanced to fall upon him, when he 
ordered the house from which it came to be burned and its 
occupants to be put to death, and his servants only evaded 
his commands by pretending that when they went there for 
the purpose they were prevented by finding that the holy 
sacrament was being carried in. When to these evidences of 
a disordered brain we add the unpardonable indiscretions 
manifested in the conduct of public business in which Philip 
was endeavoring to train him, we may imagine how the 
father might well shudder at the prospect of his vast mon- 
archy, the bulwark of the Catholic faith, falling into such 
hands, at a time when all constitutional barriers had been 
broken down and no check existed to curb the impulses of 
the sovereign. He might well fear also for his own life, for 
Carlos had avowed mortal hatred of him, and in a nature so 
violent and ungovernable that hatred might at any moment 
express itself in acts. Yet what to do with a successor to 
whom the estates of Castile had already sworn allegiance 
was a problem to tax to the utmost the wisdom of the King 



68 AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. 

and his advisers. Simply to declare him incapable of succes- 
sion, to ask the Cortes to revoke their oaths, and to await the 
birth and maturity of some more promising- heir would merely 
be to invite insubordination and civil war, with the prospect 
that Carlos, if left at liberty, would execute the design which 
was the immediate cause of his arrest — of flying from Spain 
and raising Italy or Flanders in open revolt. The only prac- 
ticable solution seemed to be to treat him as Queen Juana 
had been treated — to place him in confinement, where in the 
course of six months despair led him to commit such excesses 
of alternate gluttony and abstinence that his fragile and 
enfeebled frame sank under them. The cold impassiveness 
with which Philip watched the extinction of a young life that 
had opened under such brilliant promise invites criticism, but 
what was passing under that exterior trained to repress all 
manifestations of emotion none may guess. Paternal affec- 
tion, it is true, had been chilled by the strained relations 
which had long existed, but the complications in his plans 
caused by the catastrophe must have been the severest of 
trials, and he doubtless sought consolation in imagining him- 
self to be repeating the sacrifice of Abraham. Prescott, it 
seems to me, shows a curious blindness to the situation when 
he asks the question, "Can those who reject the imputation 
of murder acquit that father of inexorable rigor toward his 
child in the measures which he employed or of the dreadful 
responsibilit}^ which attaches to the consequences of them?" 
It has been no part of my purpose to attempt the rehabili- 
tation of Philip. I have simply sought to represent him as an 
ordinary man fashioned by influences which one may hope will 
wholly pass away in the course of human progress, although 
the affaire Dreyfus and the massacre of Kitcheneff show how 
the fires of the persecuting spirit are still occasionally rekindled 
in their ashes. To judge of Philip in this manner is not to 
approve, tacitly or overtly, the influences which made him 
what he was — what, in fact, he could not help being. These 
influences we may condemn all the more heartily when we see 
that they made of a man, slow of intellect but obstinate in the 
performance of what he was taught to regard as his duty, the 
scourge of his fellow-creatures in place of being their bene- 
factor. We can, moreover, enforce this lesson by the fact 
that this perverted sense of duty proved a curse not only to 
those on whom he trampled, but to his native land, which he 



ETHICAL VALUES IN HISTORY. 69 

fondly imagined that he was guiding- to the height of glory and 
prosperity. It had already been dangerously crippled by his 
father, whose striving for the universal monarchy was dis- 
guised by zeal for the faith. Philip's ardor in the extirpation 
of heresy not only wasted the millions which he drew from 
the mines of the New World, but exhausted Spain to a point 
that left for his successors a land of indescribable misery, of 
which the outward decadence but faintly reflected the internal 
wretchedness. Yet the principles which misled him survived 
him, and to the Spaniard of the seventeenth century Philip 
the Prudent remained the incarnate ideal of a Catholic prince. 

It is not to be assumed that history loses, in the colorless 
treatment which 1 advocate, its claims as a teacher of the 
higher morality — if I may be allowed thus to designate some 
system of practical ethics superior to that in which we of 
to-day are grouping somewhat blindly. To depict a man like 
Philip as a monster of iniquity, delighting in human misery, 
may gratify prejudice and may lend superficial life and vigor 
to narrative, but it teaches in reality no lesson. To represent 
him truthfully as the inevitable product of a distorted ethical 
conception is to trace effects to causes and to point out the 
way to improvement. This is not only the scientific method 
applied to history, but it enobles the historian's labors by 
rendering them contributory to that progress which adds to 
the sum of human happiness and fits mankind for a higher 
standard of existence. The study of the past in this spirit 
may perhaps render us more impatient of the present, and 
yet more hopeful of the future. 

As one of the last survivors of a past generation, whose 
career is rapidly nearing its end, in bidding you farewell I 
may perhaps be permitted to express the gratification with 
which, during nearly half a century, 1 have watched the 
development of historical work among us in the adoption of 
scientific methods. Year after year I have marked with grow- 
ing pleasure the evidence of thorough and earnest research on 
the part of a constantly increasing circle of well-trained 
scholars who have ho cause to shun comparison with those of 
the older hemisphere. In such hands the future of the Ameri- 
can school of history is safe and we can look forward with 
assurance to the honored position which it will assume in the 
literature of the world. 



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